Driving in Ireland: Hold Onto Your Britches

Posted on May 17, 2026May 30, 2026 by jim

If you’re planning on driving in Ireland, make this your first piece of advice: spend the extra money for the automatic, even if you’re a stick purist.
Ireland drives on the left. This is not new news, you knew that before you booked the flight.
What you don’t fully understand until you’re sitting in the passenger seat position trying to drive away from the rental lot in busy Dublin traffic is what that actually does to your brain.
Every instinct you have is wrong when you’ve spent your entire life driving on the right.
Your hands want to signal and end up windshield-wiping instead.
You go to check your mirror and you’re looking at the door.
Every time you need to stay left your entire nervous system is quietly screaming to drift right.
We rented a small Volkswagen Golf, but I constantly edged to left until I figured out the car size and lane positioning. I can’t imagine driving something bigger here.
Renting an automatic at least means you’re only managing three of your four limbs instead of all four, because the thought of running a manual transmission through all of this would be crazy – left-side traffic, blind corners, stone walls everywhere.
Then there are the roundabouts.
Driving in Ireland means accepting that roundabouts are the answer to every intersection, forever, no exceptions.
In towns and major cities there are mostly standard intersections with traffic lights, but the minute you get out of the city the lights vanish.
The roundy-rounds are everywhere else, they yield the opposite direction from what you expect, and just when you think you’ve figured them out you hit a multi-lane one in a city center and all your confidence evaporates instantly.
We stopped counting them, however Colette did the research and apparently there are currently more than 2,000 roundabouts, making it one of the most roundabout-dense nations in the world.
This translates to roughly 400 roundabouts per million people…
The roads themselves are a whole separate mess.
Outside the main routes, narrow doesn’t quite cover it.
You are driving a car down what is basically a paved sheep path with stone walls on both sides and no shoulder, and both Garmin and Google Maps are routing you through it like this is completely fine.
The passing bays – little pull-offs that show up randomly where one car can tuck in and let another squeeze past – become a way of life.
You start reading the road ahead for them automatically, budgeting them into the drive, feeling oddly victorious when you spot one early.
What you are not ready for is how fast the locals use these same roads.
We would be creeping around a blind curve on a lane roughly the width of a park bench, and an Irish driver would come through the other direction at a speed that suggested total confidence and zero concern.
They’ve driven these roads their whole lives and have the muscle memory to match. We do not.
Honestly, they should be just as concerned with my driving as we were…
Colette mentioned that the locals might know the roads, but they still have no idea where a random sheep is going to show up in the road.
Shortly thereafter we ran across a mama sheep with two babies running down the road in a blind corner.
And don’t get me started on the tire shops.
Narrow roads, rough surfaces, and potholes that appear from absolutely nowhere mean that tire shops in Ireland do a booming business.
We contributed to the local tire shop economy twice – on our first day we got a sidewall puncture only to discover that Avis does not provide a spare tire…
But – tire shops are everywhere and have mobile vans, and three hundred bucks or so later we were back on the road within an hour or so.
The second time was a screw in the tire as we were leaving Kinsale.
A local lady noticed me looking at the tire and pulled an air compressor from her van, buying us enough time to make it to a tire shop a few miles away. They sure are nice people here.
By the end of the trip we were genuinely comfortable with driving in Ireland – the left side, the roundabouts, the passing bays, the wall-lined lanes.
Then you get to fly back to the States and switch back to driving on the right…
Pro tips for driving in Ireland? Rent the automatic. Drive slow. Two hands on the wheel. Don’t pee your pants.
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We’ve included some additional final photos from the trip as this will be the last Ireland post, and a lot of short driving videos – most will look alike but they definitely provide a feel for the nonsense.

Outside The Brazen Head

Are the bars to keep people out of the bar, or to keep people in?

Kilkenny Street Scene

This looks a lot more like a mainland European town to me than what I would expect in Ireland

Touch My Coffee

I will slap you so hard even Google won’t be able to find you

Dingle Doc

I mean it is in the town of Dingle, but I’m still a juvenile…

Catch The Big One

Guinness advertising is everywhere!

Yet Another Tire Shop

This is tire number two on this trip

Down The Vee

The Vee Pass was listed as a viewpoint highlight – I guess we’re jaded living in Colorado.

Lismore Castle

A classic Irish castle above a river photo

The English Manor

This is what I think of a proper English manor looking like

Outside The Walls

This side of Cahir Castle is quite photogenic

Cahir Castle

Looking up to the castle proper

Tire Time

The tire guys in Ireland are in cahoots with the road maintenance guys…

Tarbert Ferry

Catching the Tarbert Ferry saves a ton of driving time heading along the coast.

Fish and Chips

A classic dish at Gertie Brownes in Athlone, although I did expect mushy peas.

West Cork Irish Whiskey

After two weeks of driving in Ireland – you will definitely want one of these!

It takes a ton of planning to make a trip like this happen, I would guess several hundred hours between the two of us.
Lodging.
Routing.
Attractions.
Sustenance.
Here’s a link to our Google planning map for this trip.
2,002 kilometers (1,244 miles) over two weeks isn’t easy, but it suits our travel style a lot more than hopping on a big tour bus with 60 of our closest friends.